Remembering Julian of Norwich

 

Today, May 8, is the feast day of Julian of Norwich, and for those of you who have been participating in Lent Madness, you will recall that of 32 hopefuls, Julian won the Golden Halo in this year's competition.   A silly game but a useful way to get to know some heroes of the faith.

Lately in sermons and in a piece in last week's parish newsletter, All Saints Alive, I've shared a few passages from Julian's writings.   Here are a couple of things I've found in today's reading.

In a sermon from 2018, Brother David Vryhof of the Society of St John the Evangelist offers an engaging and accessible introduction to Julian's life, times, and thought, found here.

In a video from YouTube, English church explorer Simon Knott gives us a tour of St Julian's church, which became the home of Julian when she became an anchorite, found here.

Finally, the Collect for the feast day of St. Julian.

Collect

Source and Partner of the eternal Word,
who brought to birth in the Lady Julian
many visions of your nurturing and sustaining love, move our hearts, we pray,
to seek your will above all things,
that we may know the joy of your gifts
and embrace the gift that is simply yourself;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
our Saviour, Brother, and Mother,
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Asking For The Gift of Love: A Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

 

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 5 May, 2024, the Sixth Sunday of Easter.   Readings:  Acts 10:44-48; Ps 98; 1 Jn 5:1-6; Jn 15:9-17.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. (Jn 15.12)

Summary:  As Christians, we are commanded (not asked) to love others, and yet we will consistently fail at this undertaking unless we see love as a spiritual gift, unless we ask for this gift, and unless we cultivate it.

On a fine September day many years ago, twenty five priests, ministers, and pastors reported to Base Borden for our training to become military chaplains.  Father Gordon Mintz and I were among this group.  Our calling was to show the love of God to Canada’s men and women in uniform, but first, we had to show God’s love to one another.    You would think that twenty five priests, ministers, and pastors would have no trouble showing the love of God in their lives and actions.  The sad truth is that we often failed, miserably.

Our three months of training was very mild by military standards, designed to produce just enough stress and hardship to see how we would perform under pressure.   Our instructors were seasoned soldiers, who were amused to be training padres, and who were under orders not to shout at us, at least not too much.  We were divided into three sections, and expected to work as teams, but as the pressure was applied, love and teamwork were often lacking.   Personal habits and quirks quickly got annoying, we people became irritable, and sometimes were downright selfish.   We learned who we could trust, and who would always look out for themselves.

Things got so bad that one of our groups became downright dysfunctional.  Finally their training sergeant lined them up for a lecture.   “You padres don’t have to like each other,”, he said, “but in the military you’re expected to work with others”.  I remember overhearing this lecture and being shocked that it had come to this, that priests, pastors and ministers weren’t being asked to love one another, weren’t even being asked like one another, just being told to work together.

Jesus sets the bar a lot higher than that sergeant did.    Jesus asks us to love one another.   In fact, he doesn’t ask us to love one another, he commands us to love one another.   It’s not the only command Jesus gives in the gospels - he tells people to repent and to follow him, but this command, “love one another as I have loved you”, is certainly the greatest and most important of Jesus’ commandments.

So the obvious problem we need to confront is our simple inability to love the way that Jesus loves.   Jesus here speaks of a great transmission of love, love flowing from the eternal and infinite heart of God the Father to the Son, and from the Son to the disciples.   It is a love that has already been expressed by Jesus washing his disciples’ feet as a servant would, and it is a love that is forecast in his impending death, when Jesus will lay down his life for his friends (Jn 15.13).  How can we love in the humble, self-sacrificial, and infinite way that Jesus loves us?

The answer is that we can’t love this way, at least, not by ourselves.    It’s fine to say that we love others as an abstract principle, but it’s harder to love specific people, especially when we meet them, and even when we meet them in church!   In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagines a senior devil advising his trainee on how to discourage faith in someone who has just started going to church.

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. (Screwtape Letters, Chapter 2)

If the sort of minor annoyances that Lewis describes can keep us from fully loving our neighbour, then, as my opening story suggested, how much worse will it be for us when stress, tension, and selfish impulses overwhelm us and pull us away from the love of God?

We need to be honest with ourselves that we cannot produce the love that Jesus commands of us if left to our own devices.   Love is a spiritual gift.    You know the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13 that if often read at weddings - “love is patient, love is kind” (1 Cor 13:4-7).   When I’ve tried to prepare couples for marriage, I like to tell them that the love described here is not human love. Rather, love is a spiritual gift that will help them keep their wedding vows, but they have to ask for it.

In John’s gospel, Jesus invites his friends to “abide in my love”, just as he abides in his Father’s love.   We all know the term “abide” from the old hymn “Abide With Me” where it means something like “stay with me” or “don’t leave me”.   Here Jesus means something richer and more permanent.  “Abide in my love”  could mean “shelter in my love”, “remain in my love”, or just “live in my love”.  In other words, “abide” has that same sense of an close and sustaining relationship that was in Jesus’ branch and vine language from last Sunday.  Jesus invites us to find shelter inside the love that he and the Father share, to enter into the very heart of the Holy Trinity.

Again, this is not a love that we can produce ourselves.  It is a gift that we have to ask for.   One example of someone who asked for this love is the medieval English mystic, Julian of Norwich.   You may have heard about her during our Lent Madness exercise, and I wrote a piece on her in this week’s All Saints Alive.    After a period of sickness, Julian wrote of very powerful experience of God’s love that she received after her had fixed her thoughts on Jesus and on his sufferings before his death on the cross.   In her mind’s eye, these sufferings became signs of Jesus’ great love for her and for all humanity, which explains the title of her book, Revelations of Divine Love.

At the very end of her book, Julian described all her visions and insights as one great gift from God who wishes to draw us from our sorrows and darkness to God’s heavenly joy.   Julian describes hearing these final words: ‘Wouldst thou learn^[3] thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. .. Thus was I learned^[4] that Love was our Lord's meaning” (Revelations Chapter 86).  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52958/52958-h/52958-h.htm#CHAPTER_LXXXVI

The gift of the great Christian mystics is that they unveil something of God’s nature and purpose.  Julian recognized that God in Christ loves what he created and wishes to draw us from sin and darkness into God’s joy.   Her insights began when she focused on Jesus, on Jesus’ love for her, and on her love for Jesus.    Julian realized that love was reciprocal, that her love for Jesus was returned infinitely, and this realization gave her joy and freedom.

While we can’t all be mystics, I think we can find ways to abide in Jesus’ love.  One way might be to find stories in the gospel that we can keep in our hearts and minds.  John’s gospel offers two powerful examples.   I’ve referred to Jesus washing his friends’ feet, but an example of Jesus’ love being returned comes just before his final days in Jerusalem, when he stays with his friends, Lazarus and his sisters.  At dinner that night, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with costly perfume and wipes them with her hair.   It’s a powerful story of how we can adore Jesus and give him all we have, and find our love vastly returned,  Perhaps you can find a similar story, or just a mental image, that might focus your love on Jesus and see that love returned.  Or simply ask God for the gift of love, as God loves you in Christ.

I think back to those would be chaplains, some of us so conspicuously lacking in love. We focused on our physical fitness, on trying to be soldiers.  Some of us wanted to fit in to the military. Some of us just wanted stable careers and officer’s pay.   We wanted these things more than we wanted the one thing that was there at the start, the gift of God’s love.  We just had to ask for it.   

Flourishing On the Vine: A Homily For the Fifth Sunday After Easter

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, the Fifth Sunday of Easter (B), April 28, 2024.  Readings for this Sunday:  Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:24-30; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

“Jesus said, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower” (Jn 15.1).

The Gulf Islands, dotted along the east coast of Vancouver Island in BC, are beautiful places to visit and to live, and you may be surprised to learn that they are destinations for wine lovers.   I remember visiting one years ago, and toured a winery that had literally been built out of the stone ribs of the island.   Terraces had been dynamited out of the rock, soil brought in by ferry, and vines imported from far away.  Given the costs of such an enterprise, you can imagine that the owners and investors keep a close eye on the health and production of the vines, and will quickly replace any that aren’t producing the required amount to be profitable.  In other words, the owner’s view of the vines is purely utilitarian;   what vines give the best return on investment?

Today we hear Jesus use imagery about vines and spiritual fruit, which is a common image in scripture, in the sense of how we as believers bear spiritual fruit.  In Galatians, for example, St Paul talks about how those who are “led by the [Holy] Spirit” will produce good fruits, such as love, joy, and gentleness (Gal 5.22-23).

Well, we hope and pray that we will produce good spiritual fruit, but perhaps the sense of expectation might make us uneasy.  After all, in our gospel today there is a third character, the Father as vinegrower.  Is the Father out in his vineyard, regarding us with a critical eye, measuring our spiritual fruit against his expectations of us?

And isn't there the sense in scripture that if we don’t produce good fruits, or a good spiritual result, then God will be displeased?    In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells a parable about final judgement where the righteous will be harvested like wheat, whereas the evildoers will be treated as weeds and burned in a furnace.  There’s similar language in today’s gospel where Jesus warns that “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned” (Jn 15.6).

Because of such passages in scripture, I think it’s natural for us to attribute the same utilitarian motives God as we would to any other vineyard owner or farmer.   The thinking would go as follows:   either I produce results that are pleasing to God, or I will be judged as deficient and I will not be saved.  I don’t agree with that way of thinking, and I want to reassure you that it’s not helpful or true to how God in Christ sees us and loves us.    The gospel is not coercive.   God isn’t a “do this or else” God.   God loves the world God created, and God’s purpose is to save the world.   So with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on in today’s gospel.

As they say, context is everything.   Our gospel reading today takes us back to the events of Maundy Thursday.  Jesus is gathered with his disciples, he has washed their feet, he has predicted Judas’ betrayal, and he has told them that he is with them “only a little longer” (Jn 13.31).   What follows next are words of reassurance to people who are disturbed and uneasy about a future that has suddenly become uncertain.  Jesus assures his friends that he will never abandon them.  And so Jesus “I am the vine, you are the branches” words are a powerful image of how the disciples will remain in an intimate and life-giving relationship with Jesus.

Throughout John’s gospel, Jesus has described himself as the one who nurtures, sustains, and gives life to his disciples.   These descriptions are known as the “I AM” statements.   In these sayings, Jesus variously describes himself as “the bread of life” (Jn 6.35), as “the light of the world” (Jn 8.12, 9.5), as the “gate” (Jn 10.7), and “good shepherd” of the sheep (Jn 10.11), as “the resurrection and the life” (Jn 11.25), and as “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14.6).  All of these things - bread, light, protection, a safe path, and life itself - are essential to our human flourishing.   They are all part of Jesus’ self-declared mission that his followers “may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10.10).  Not have life meagrely.  Not have life in a subsistence way, but to have life fully, joyously, overflowing - abundantly.

Now, in today’s gospel, Jesus makes this statement explicit.  Previously in these statements, Jesus has just described himself - “I Am”.  Now, he includes the disciples.  “I am the vine, you are the branches”.   It’s the same message of life and intimacy, but now Jesus makes it clear that his followers, you and me, are involved.   He is the vine, we are the branches.   

What I love about this image is that it’s one of interdependence.     The vine supports the branches and gives them life, but there would be no purpose to the vine, and certainly no grapes, if there were no branches.    In the same way, as Jesus has already told the disciples on this night, he is their master and lord, but he is also their servant who has knelt and washed their feet.   We depend on Jesus for life, for purpose, and for salvation, but Jesus depends on us to be the church, to spread the gospel, and to love the world he died to save.  Just think back to our first reading, from Acts.  How could the Ethiopian man have learned who Jesus was if it hadn’t been for Philip?

Thinking about the vine and branches language as an image of relationship with Jesus should help dispel some of the fears about good fruits vs judgement that I outlined at the start of this homily.   The vine knows that it must give life to the branches.   The branches know that they they cannot live without the vine, and if they are connected to the vine, then they will produce fruit.  The branches don’t think about how much fruit they will produce, or what kind.  They just know that they will produce fruit.

In the same way, in our second lesson, if God is love, and if we know God through Christ, then we will love.   How exactly we love, and what that will look like, will vary from person to person, but all in all, it’s going to look like love.   In a sermon on our second lesson, St. Augustine summarized it quite neatly when he said the point is this:  “love God, and do what you want”, because once we love God, then whatever we do will come from God. 

I don't think of God as the vineyard owner, watching us critically to see how we perform.   Maybe God is more like a gardener who is just happy to see plants flourishing.   I like to think that God sees us the way that Joy and I see the apple tree growing in the front yard of our house in Barrie.   We don't keep the tree for it's apples; they are little, green sour things, and we’re too lazy to try and make jam or jelly out of them.  

In the summer months, the apples drop to the ground, hundreds of them in a day sometimes, and we try to collect them before the wasps arrive.   We put up with the apples and the wasps because, for two weeks in May, when the tree blossoms, it’s the most beautiful thing that God ever made.    At the end of these two weeks, its fragrant white petals float to the ground, coating the driveway like snow. 

We love this tree simply because it gives us joy.    Someone else might cut it down as a nuisance, but as long as it’s in our care, we are committed to it.   I like to think that our love for this tree is just a pale shadow of God’s love for us.    God wants us to flourish, and sent his son to live with us and in us so that we might grow and blossom.    And maybe this is the point of the Christian life, to grow and to flourish, even blossom sometimes, because our growth and flourishing delights the heart of God.